Final Edits Done and Initial Reviews

I hope everyone had a better week than I did. In the span of six days, I managed to tear the epithelial layer (otherwise known as skin) of my right eyeball, causing my right eye to go entirely blurry, and then give myself a pretty nasty corneal abrasion (otherwise known as puncture wound) on my left eyeball, which left me in serious pain and working essentially in the dark for all of Thursday. By dark, I mean that I pulled down the blinds in my office, closed the door to the hallway, turned off all of the overhead lights, turned down my monitor brightness by about 75% and wore sunglasses the whole day, even in my dark office. I probably would have stayed home and rolled around in my dark bedroom writhing in pain, but, in this case, my eye actually hurt worse when it was closed, so I was able to get quite a lot accomplished with very little blinking on Thursday. Luckily, just a day later, my left eye is feeling much better! The swelling is greatly diminished, and the worst of the veiny redness is gone. My right eye is still a bit blurry, but it is also improving. That said, a lot of great things happened for Compendium, despite my medical mishaps.

Editing Done! My amazingly awesome editor, Angela Brown, turned back the proofed version of Compendium to me on Tuesday. Having not yet acquired my corneal abrasion and despite my blurry right eye, I incorporated all of her proofed changes and formatted the book for ebook that same night. On Wednesday, despite my newly acquired corneal abrasion, I formatted the book for print. The ebook looks great on my phone in the Kindle app, and it looks great on my Kindle as well (although the cover isn’t showing up on the Kindle, probably because I emailed it to myself instead of downloading it from the Kindle store). I’m REALLY excited for everyone to get to see it. After a proofing mishap with the print version, I have some proofs on preorder for that as well. They should arrive Tuesday of next week. It looks like I might need one more round of print proofing, as Day has expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of bleed on the cover via the online proofing tool. We will see! I will post pictures of the actual book as soon as it’s ready for public consumption!

Initial Reviews: I was also incredibly relieved and gratified to receive three reviews this week from Readers’ Favorite. You can check them all out at Readers’ Favorite by clickinghere . Two of them were glowing five star reviews, and the third was a positive four star review. Here is an excerpt from Samantha Coville’s review:

If you have plans for the next few days, do not pick up this book. I repeat: do not start unless you are willing to read for hours on end, gripped by the racing story line and breathtaking intrigue that fills the pages. I cannot wait for the next book to come out and I hope the series continues for many more books after that. I’m bookmarking this author because I know I will fall in love with every word she writes. Wow.

Readers' Favorite

That quote made me feel excellent! I conceived of the basic idea for Compendium in the summer of 2013 and started writing it in August of that year. After almost two years of work and four revisions, it’s very hard to maintain perspective on my work. I don’t know if this is true for all authors, but I stopped having an emotional reaction when I read a book I’ve revised four times. I still feel that thrill with new material, including the chapters of Ocularum I am working on now, but it’s validating to know that others might read Compendium and enjoy it, especially since my brain is tired of looking at it! I know not everyone will love it or even like it, but knowing that some people do is incredibly motivating as a writer.

Blog Tour: As an additional update, the schedule for my blog tour with CBB Book Promotions running from May 4 to May 15 is filling up! We already have SEVENTEEN stops planned. I will update everyone with the specific schedule after it is posted, but stopping by the tour will give you the chance to win an Amazon gift card (I haven’t finalized the amount yet, but it will be at least $100), so stay tuned. There will also be additional excerpts from Compendium and interviews and guest posts by me. Also, if you are blogger who is interested in being added to this blog tour as a reviewer, through a guest post, author interview or excerpt, feel free to stop by thesign up page, because Candace is still accepting additional spots.

Anyway, that is all for this week. Sorry for the lengthy post, but I had lots of great news to share!